From Wounded Knee to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and from the Upper Big Branch mine disaster to the Trail of Tears, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered presents photographs of significant sites from US history, posing unsettling questions about the contested memory of traumatic episodes from the nation’s past. Focusing especially on landscapes related to African American, Native American, and labor history, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered reveals new vistas of officially commemorated sites, sites that are neglected or obscured, and sites that serve as a gathering place for active rituals of organized memory.


These powerful photographs by award-winning photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein are interspersed with short essays by some of the leading historians of the United States. The book is introduced with substantive meditations on meaning and landscape by Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review, and Edward T. Linenthal, former editor of the Journal of American History. Individually, these images convey American history in new and sometimes startling ways. Taken as a whole, the volume amounts to a starkly visual reckoning with the challenges of commemorating a violent and conflictual history of subjugation and resistance that we forget at our peril.
 

This paperback facsimile edition restores to print Howard Kester’s Revolt among the Sharecroppers, a lost classic of southern radicalism. First published in 1936, Kester’s brief, stirring book provides a dramatic eyewitness account of the origins of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU), the Arkansas Delta sharecroppers’ organization whose cause was championed by religious radicals and socialists during the 1930s. Accompanying Kester’s original text is a substantial new introductory essay by historian Alex Lichtenstein.

This edition will introduce general readers, scholars, and students to a social movement with significant historical implications. In its commitment to interracialism, the STFU challenged long-standing southern traditions. In its hostility to the agricultural recovery programs of the 1930s (which tended to benefit landowners at the expense of tenant farmers), the union offered an early critique of New Deal liberalism. And, finally, in its insistence that the dispossessed could assume control of their own destiny, the STFU foreshadowed the progressive social movements of the 1960s. Thus, Revolt among the Sharecroppers is an important primary document that makes a signal contribution to our understanding of labor history, African American history, and the history of Depression-era America.

Kester’s text recounts the early history of the STFU and its criticisms of the New Deal in compelling, accessible prose. Lichtenstein’s introduction offers biographical background on Kester, explores the religious and socialist beliefs that led him to work with the STFU, describes the racial and social climate that shaped the union’s emergence, places the union’s rise and decline within the context of 1930s politics, and outlines the legacy of this remarkable organization.